Muay Thai champion vs. huge boxing champion with 100 pound advantage

Freak show fights used to be all the rage back in the day in Japan in both MMA and kickboxing. Most of the time they were abhorrent mismatches but sometimes they led to compelling matches that you wouldn’t get to see under normal conditions.

In the following video, we see one of those such compelling cases in a kickboxing match involving a Muay Thai/k1 champion taking on a much larger former heavyweight boxer named Francois Botha who even held a major title in boxing.

The Thai fighter, named Kaoklai, is actually quite big for a Thai who fought most of his career at 175lbs. His opponent, Francois Botha, is way bigger though and was probably around 260lbs for this fight.

You’ve got to admire Kaoklai’s guts for taking a fight against such a larger opponent and it’s not like Botha is unskilled either. He held the IBF heavyweight boxing championship and fought the who’s who in boxing for his time including Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis and Vitali Klitschko.

What’s interesting about this fight though is by no means does Kaoklai get overwhelmed here despite being outweighed by almost 100lbs! He comes in with the right strategy of sticking and moving and using a lot of kicks.

He also makes great use of teeps or front push kicks to keep his much larger foe at bay and out of punching range.

This fight really shows the effectiveness of Muay Thai against a larger opponent. Had the smaller man been just a western boxer as well, he would have next to no chance against someone that much bigger.

Though the boxer Francois Botha ends up getting the decision, Kaoklai’s performance here was still very impressive. He did a good job staying out of trouble as well as not taking too much damage from his much larger opponent.

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